How Customer Data Is Reshaping Financial Services Marketing

The financial services sector is probably one of the oldest ones if we’re talking about the modern economy. Everyone needs some effective way to manage their funds, salaries, and investments, right?

But as it turns out, there are many areas in which the financial sector isn’t as modern as it would seem.

For instance, banks are traditionally built in a siloed fashion, meaning that they are structured around specific internal product groups, instead of being customer-oriented.

What this means is that bankers find it difficult to offer their services based on the known set of information about a given customer. In other words, instead of using actual data, they are mostly just wandering in the dark, trying different things and seeing what sticks.

That being said, even despite the downsides, banks can simply afford to do that. Their revenue streams are vast enough for such mistakes to remain unnoticed unless something drastic happens in the market space in general.

How Can Affiliates Learn From This?

Like always, we’re only talking about the financial services market to somehow relate the insights to what affiliates can do to grow their businesses.

There’s one main message in all this. And it’s the following: building your business around your products instead of building it around customers is a bad bet.

Think of it this way:

Are you offering various products purely because they give a good payout per single lead?

Do you offer a wide range of unrelated products?

Are you offering many alternatives of the same type of product, which makes the customer confused?

Are you offering a sensible funnel that guides the customer by the hand through various stages of advancement, so to speak?

Are your products related to one another on a factual level?

You surely get the big picture by now. Basically, the more customer-oriented your business is, as opposed to product-oriented, the better chance you have at making it big.

How to Develop Customer-Oriented Structure?

In a word, data.

Data is how you can put various visitors and then customers into certain brackets and target your offers more effectively.

A good starting point is to set up certain tools and services to gather as much data about your traffic as you can. This goes above simple Google Analytics or conversion tracking that your affiliate software offers.

You should try some other solutions like Clicky, Crazy Egg, MailChimp, and some of the SEO tools we reviewed a while ago.

They will give you the groundwork.

What’s next? Work with data actively. What’s important is not what data you have at your disposal, but how well you can connect the dots and create quality customer profiles.

Finally, the last step is to use this data to pick the right range of products that fall well into a customer’s path to mastery.